A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes

Though this is a rigorously researched book, it's written in such a lively, entertaining way that non-specialists will love it. Bale assembles an amazing collection of medieval travel guides and narratives to make his points about how the experience of traveling hasn't changed much for tourists and businesspeople across time. Witty asides about foreign phrase guides, currency exchange rates, travel budgets, how to avoid sketchy tour guides, how to cross a desert, what to eat, etc. help make the nuts and bolts of medieval travel vivid. After reading this, you'll never complain about a delayed flight or a noisy hotel room again. A fun page-turner.

Great stories interwoven within the era of the Middle Ages. Takes the reader on many journeys in Europe, near east, and in SW Asia. Gives great insight into traveling for many sorts of reasons.

Love history and this was special.

So what do you expect travel was like in the 11th or 12th century. Pretty primitive, eh? Not so, as this book lays out in fun and delightful detail. There were many hazards, to be sure, but also it was far more organized than I would have imagined. It's all laid out here in as much detail as probably available a few centuries later.It may be little disorganized, but who's in a hurry? If you enjoy fun facts piled onto fun facts, this is the book for you! Enjoy and learn air your leisure.

I liked this but I’m a bit of a nerd - think it could be livened up a bit with more fun anecdotes about early travel - slogged thru but gave the last chapter a miss & didn’t pass onto history buff friends as too academic for a really enjoyable read. Also kind of wandered…

This book was everything I thought it would be and so much more. I am so happy I found it!I first became interested during a give-away on Goodreads. I didn't win, but I was reviewing the want-to-read and found out my local library had it!This book filled in and connected so much of the history and fiction I read over the years. I am a practicing Christian and it was also interesting from that respect. I did pull up a map from time to time to help understand more.From Britain to Java and possibly the north coast of Australia, people in the Middle Ages traveled. And wrote about it. Some explorers, some pilgrimages, and a lot of commerce.I really really appreciate the opportunity to learn so many new things and have a lot of gaps filled in from my previous reading.I recommend this book highly for anyone as a starter book in this genre, and also if you read about anything else: novels set in the Middle Ages in Europe, history books in Near-East Asia and Europe, etc.

This was quite a fun listen! It's interesting how as much has travel has changed, it hasn't changed at all, really. It's tiring, inconvenient, expensive, fraught with perils and you just don't know what to expect in foreign lands. Thankfully, no one killed me immediately when I choked on some watermelon the other day!The narrator was great, easy to listen to and proficient with the foreign pronunciations. A++

First, this book unquestionably has a wealth of random information about the logistics of medieval travel. There are some eye-opening facts, and the author has done his research.The problem is that, with a limited amount of documentary material to draw from, he has decided to include everything he knows! It has the feel of desperately struggling to meet a publisher’s wordcount. This makes for a slow and painful read. The book is largely a series of disparate anecdotes that never quite coalesce. Factoid followed by unrelated factoid. Some editorial intervention would have benefited the work greatly.The little boxed insets at the end of each chapter aren’t uniform or parallel to each other. It’s frankly a bit lazy and haphazard, and the reader is left confused about why this information is not simply integrated into the larger text. Were these an afterthought? The timeline is similarly opaque…you have an anecdote from 1450, and suddenly an inexplicable reference to 1011. I kept getting discombobulated as to what century was being described. I feel that a good editor could have helped tame this problem.More than half of the book concerns itself with pilgrimage travelers to the Holy Land.. Understood - there are several reliable travelers’ journals and “guidebooks” to draw from, so this is what gets the lion’s share of the focus. Unfortunately, this initial half of the book isn’t really about travel at all, but more about Middle Ages religious customs. The author is obviously quite devout, and his focus is more on faith and religious history than it is on travel, per se. Consequently, there are constant digressions on the Christianity of the day, the politics of religion, and the interfacing of the big three religions. This is not really how the book is billed (or described on Amazon). And contributes to the painfully slow pace of the narrative if what you’re here for is the history of medieval travel.Finally, it must be asked: why no maps?! Much is made of the period’s new literary genre of travel booklets (or perhaps “pamphlets”), yet none is reproduced nor even physically described here. If ever a book shouted out for some visual aids, this is it! This is a glaring weakness, indeed.

Short and fascinating!

A rather rambling stroll through 400 years of travel. Interesting but an awful lot of sudden changes of century and topic. Book reads like a penultimate draft.